Reading Assange and Manning Through Zizek's Criminality of Law and Order

Zizek's Introduction is Perfect.

Snowden Escaped Barely in Time Thanks to Assange

Foucault's Genealogy of Parrhesia- From Ancient Greece

Write to Assange in Solidarity

Manning Back in Jail. Obama Waited Too Long to Free Her

Zizek's Introduction

....anarchist outbursts are not a transgression of the Law and Order; in our societies , anarchism already is in power wearing the mask of Law and Order - our Justice is the travesty of Justice, the spectacle of Law and Order is an obscene carnival - the point made clear by the arguably greatest political poem in English, Shelley's 'The Mask of Anarchy', which describes the obscene parade of the figures of power:

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came anarchy: he rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood,

He was pale even to the lips,

Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;

And in his grasp a sceptre shone;

On his brow this mark I saw - 

'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

And is not this Hegelian-Chestertonian shift from the criminal transgression of Law and Order to Law and Order itself as the highest criminal transgression directly enacted by Mao (read the US here)  himself? This is why, while setting in motion and secretly pulling the strings of the self-destructive carnival, Mao nonetheless remained exempt from its turbulence: at no moment was there ever a serious threat that Stalin (or Mao) himself would be ritualistically deposed, treated as 'yesterday a king, today a beggar' - he was not the traditional Master, but the 'Lord of Misrule':

And who is our Lord of Misrule? Trump? Congress? Or all of them? 

NO

It is the reign of today's global capitalism which is the true LORD OF MISRULE!

ZIZEK

Reading Irigaray's SPECULUM and THIS SEX WHICH IS NOT ONE through LeCarre's LOOKING GLASS WAR

This is the most readable and accessible one.

WORDS WRITTEN IN BLOOD ARE NOT TO BE READ BUT LEARNT BY HEART. -NIETZSCHE

This is difficult and deconstructs Freud's Oedipus Complex for little girls.

Some Examples of What Irigaray Says

All page numbers are from the Octopus Edition of 5 novels.

They never talked about Sarah. It was as if they shared a single relationship to Avery's wife, like children who are able to share a toy they no longer care for. Leclerc said, "Well, she's got that son of yours to keep her company......Leclerc was proud of knowing it was a son and not a a daughter. 

(p. 398)

She left the room, Woodford watching her. He took his pipe from his mouth and grinned. Avery knew he was going to say something about sleeping with Carol and suddenly he'd had enough.

Did your wife make that cup, Bruce? he asked quickly. I hear she's quite a potter.

Made the saucer as well, he said. He began talking about the classes she went to, the amusing way it had caught on in Wimbledon, how his wife was tickled to death. (p. 411)

It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe. It is their battlefield still; if there is love, they find it here in one another, shyly like adolescents, thinking all the time of other people. (p.445)

Avery was already familiar, during his short association with the department, with the phenomenon of organic motivation; with operations which had no discernible genesis and no conclusion, which formed part of an unending pattern of activity until they ceased to have any further identity; with that progress of fruitless courtships which, in the aggregate, passed for an active love life. (479)

He liked to talk to Avery. He talked about his women or the war. He assumed - it was irritating for Avery, but nothing more - -that a man in his middle thirties, whether married or not, led an intense and varied love life. Later in the evening when the two of them had put on their coats and hurried to the pub at the end of the road, he would lean his elbows on the small table, thrust his bright face forward and relate the smallest detail of his exploits, his hand beside his chin, his slim fingertips rapidly parting and closing in unconscious imitation of his mouth. It was not vanity which made him thus but friendship. These betrayals and confessions, whether truth or fantasy, were the simple coinage of their intimacy....

Avery came to know Leiser's face with an accuracy no longer related to memory. (Here we have the MALE GAZE Lacan discusses)He noticed how its features seemed structurally to alter shape according to his mood, how when he was tired or depressed at the end of a long day the skin on his cheekbones was drawn upwards rather than down, and the corners of his eyes and mouth rose tautly so that his expression was at once more Slav and less familiar. (p. 493)

I wouldn't mind a bit of what Fred's having, Johnson said with a snigger. He played a shot; a white ball dropped dutifully into its hold. Poles are dead randy. Go up anything, a Pole will. Specially Fred, he's a real terror. He's got the walk.

Are you that way, Jack?

When I'm in the mood. I wouldn't mind a little bit now, as a matter of fact.

They played a couple of shots, each lost in an alcoholic euphoria of erotic fancy. 

...Here's to Fred, Avery said.

To Fred. On the nest. And bloody good luck to him....

I dont know how he'll manage the B2, Johnson murmured. He's got a long way to go....

Fred. He's a lovely boy. Here: do you know this bloke Woodford, the one who picked me up?

Of course. He'll be coming down next week.

Met his wife at all, Babs? She was a girl, she was; give it to anyone.....

They drank ; that joke went astray. 

She used to go with the amin bloke, Jimmy Gorton..... (p. 499)

Is he getting frisky? Sometimes they want a girl about now. (p. 506)

A certain hilarity infected the briefing that morning. Johnson made a joke about not photographing the Oxford Constabulary by mistake; Leiser laughed richly and even Haldane allowed himself a wan smile. It was the end of of term; the boys were going home.
The exercise was a success. Johnson was pleased; Avery enthusiastic; Leiser manifestly delighted. They had made two faultless transmissions, ....at eight o'clock they assembled for dinner wearing their best suits. a special menu had been arranged. Haldane had presented the rest of his burgundy; toasts were made; there was talk of an annual reunion in years to come.  Leiser looked very smart in a dark blue suit and a pale tie of watered silk. (p. 507)

Too many sweets on the plane, that's your trouble, that's your trouble. Johnson winked at Avery. I saw you giving that air hostess a look. You shouldn't do it, Fred, you know, you'll break her heart.  He frowned round the table in mock disapproval. He really looked her over, you know. a proper tip-to-toe job. (p. 518)

Leiser smiled. It was the best ever, that week, John. It's funny, isn't it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it's the men that matter; just the men.

You're one of us, Fred. You always were; all the time your card was there, you were one of us. We dont forget. (p. 530) 

When we met him he was a man without love. Do you know what love is? I'll tel you; it is whatever you can still betray. We ourselves live without it in our profession. We dont force people to do things for us. We let them discover love. And, of course leiser did, didn't he? He married us for money, so to speak, and left us for love.
Avery said quickly, What do you mean for money? 
I mean whatever we gave to him, Love is what he gave to us.

When he saw those letters, drawn out in Jack's neat, post-office hand, tears of gratitude started to his eyes. He never told me, he thought, he never told me he'd done it. Jack was all right, after all. Jack, the captain and young John; what a team to work for, he thought; a man could go through life and never meet a set of blokes like that. (p.546)

That Budapest thing, Leclerc continued, raising his voice, partly in enthusiasm and partly to dispel the atmosphere of intimacy which suddenly threatened them... (p. 558)

Avery spoke for the first time. You cant leave him out there all alone.His voice was flat. (p. 562)

Love. Yes, love! Not yours, Haldane, mine. Smiley's right! You made me do it for you, made me love him! It wasn't in you anymore! I brought him to you, I kept him in your house, made him dance to the music of your bloody war! i piped for him, but there's no breath in me now. He's Peter Pan's last victim, Haldane, the last one, the last love; the last music gone.

Avery had buried his face in his hands.(p. 563)

Avery was sobbing like a child. No one heeded him. (p.564)


_______________________________________________________________________________
ZIZEK tells us that the future is already here. It comes in fragments and we can embrace that which we want to preserve or ignore at our peril what we do not wish to come about. The LGW was published in 1963 soon after LeCarre wrote The Spy Who Came In From the Cold gave Carre the financial success he needed to quit M15 or whatever it was called then. He himself was vulnerable at this time, an alcoholic and a marriage tottering. He was writing in words of blood. 

Irigaray tells this to us. That male homosexual erotic power rules the world. Why the fact that gay men cannot be tolerated to upset this applecart of world rule. And heterosexual sex is the MASK that conceals it. Gay men are hated because they have broken the rule and have become commodities up for sexual exchange. Just like women. Men unconscious of their homosexuality are masking it with macho behavior and heterosexual sexual preferences. In this case they denigrate women when they are together talking about women. This is misogyny that we recognize without understanding it. Women are excluded but now have been invited in on the periphery of the limit, but they will never really be part of the good ol' boys clubs. It is clear that Carre knows very well what is going on among them erotically, but tells us very subtly. He is implying. When I get to Bolano the subtle telling disappears.

Irigaray also is writing in BLOOD. With the 1974 publication of SPECULUM the Lacanians kicked her out of psychoanalytic practice, expelled her from The Freud School and banished her from her teaching at the University of Vincennes which she helped to found. Three Lacanians were on the board evaluating her proposal for classes the following semester. This is how you get MURDERED in the academic profession. Clearly she was seen as VERY DANGEROUS. They were correct by the way. She is.

DIANE BURKO: THE PAINTER OF HER GENERATION

SLIDE SHOW

POLITICS OF SNOW

What determines an artist who makes works of art revered through the ages of time?

Success in their own time? 

One landmark is a CUT in Art History such as Picasso made more than once. Is it this? 

Leonardo took on great themes of mythology, of portrait painting, of landscape.

Michangelo's great theme was Christianity in the Sistine Chapel.

IMO the great theme now is the DEATH of Planet Earth as we know it, this hospitable place for our species and all those contemporaneous with us that took hundreds of millions of years to prepare.

What other artist has spent her life detailing this catastrophe we have made?

And why has she not been recognized as such? A prophet in her own country aphorism?

Well she has been traveling, teaching drawing/painting for 30 years, raising a family and working non stop in her studio, not schmoozing and PR ing with the rich and famous. Not a lifestyle to attract big time buyers around the world.

I first met Diane Burko quietly in the cafeteria at the University of Pennsylvania. I was doing research in psychology on Piaget's Conservation Concepts and she was beginning her MFA in preparation for teaching. There was nothing about her to suggest she had visions of greatness in her field. She was getting her credentials for teaching. And that's all I remember of her.

I would come across her work hanging in homes (John McCoubrey for one) and these early paintings were birds's eye views of landscapes. A green country farm, Philadelphia from the sky or up high somewhere. The kind of thing you see on google these days of places you know.

I would hear about her but never in terms of her being the next great thing. Her early large paintings of glaciers were elegant, austere, untouchable,  indifferent to us, our eyes looking at these objects. The brush strokes did not play erotically on the canvas, did not convey sensuousness. These fierce bitterly cold and indifferent glaciers were monstrously indifferent as Herzog would say, and Burko responded in kind. Her brushstrokes followed Nietsche's advice "Be more so than the subject, be WORSE!"

Then in the early 1990's Burko would get a grant to live and paint in Monet's Giverny. Here she painted the same scenes Monet painted and her brush was inspired by his, her strokes flowed and dripped and she became a different painter.  It was then I came to know her better through a mutual friend. And then I left Philadelphia. 

When I thought of her I began to think of her as a witness of Climate Change in the world. All her paintings became paintings of a lost world to me in my mind. Her life's work a chronicle of grief which she seemed not to acknowledge in any of her interviews online or in person. 

An example of Lacan and Zizek comes to mind for her. The unknown knowns that rule our lives, our destinies. I can think of nothing else that explains all the years she did this, flying in helicopters, airplanes, touring all these inaccessible unloving places. 

By 2006 the awareness of Climate Change, then labeled Global Warming, went more mainstream. Burko's paintings were then sought out to promote what scientists had been saying in their dry obtuse way with numbers and graphs. The paintings were irresistible for making their point and Burko responded with her great generosity of spirit. 

She no longer has to take her own photos because science has recorded these changes for her in their scientific photos. Places that she visited with exhilaration and desire, camera in hand, leaning out the opened door of a plane to get the shot she wanted, were now available to her as change by change took place. As Baudrillard would say what was conceived in the Symbolic Order as passion, living, sacred, death, love, seduction, challenge was entering the Order of Production. Science, measurement, survival, fascination, control began to take over and Burko began to paint the changes in those places of long ago that would never be the same again.

Here is where we get into the CUT in art history, the age old problem of representation. 

The more recent paintings of the glaciers, the mountains of ice encrusted snow over stone have melted, so what are we seeing. We are seeing representations of NOW? No longer the same as THEN. 

Burko has expressed her early abstract leanings as opposed to the landscape by jumping out of the dichotomy, the binary box art history had long confined them in, and soaring up high to Heaven, taking the object with a God's Eye perspective. Philip Guston also merged the figure/abstract concept he had struggled with. Art is eliminating contradictions, ideology, false dichotomies.

Now we can see a figure as abstract. We can google the Earth and its lands, sea, and air which now appear as abstract paintings. The artists gave us these images first in some way knowing what to reveal to us.

Where is the original? Is it the glacier now? Or is the one now the simulacrum. Maybe the simulacrum is the one Burko photographed and painted years and years ago? Is the original one 100 years ago? 1000000 ago? It is impossible to know. 

Each one in time is a simulacrum.

There cannot be anything to be called representational for it will become different in time. There will never be an original, only copies of copies.

The illusion of an original is an illusion.

There is no such thing.It has just been made up.Time will change anything

but maybe so slow you cannot notice.

Am I the same as the young woman who met Burko in 1966? Am I the simulacrum now? Or was I the simulacrum then?

I have no identity.Only multiple selves.

There is no linear time. No beginning. No end.

I am always someone different. I just change too slowly for myself to notice.

Now the glacier has changed in my lifetime so I can see the changes.

Glaciers used to change slowly so in one life their changes were not seen.

Now they change faster and faster so we can see. 
Will they speed up like a movie?

Now Burko photographs and paints volcanoes. The melting molten rivers of fire run down and around the volcano, twisting and flowing, burning all in its path then turning to hard, charcoal stony rock petrified lava gone cold. Stopped.

And here is the resonance with Houellebecq's Lanzarote.

Lanzarote - tourist attraction now

Once a cheap tourist destination until Houellebecq made it famous, these islands had endured volcanic explosions for over 100 years. The EFFECT on the people is detailed by Houellebecq in the Afterward of the novel. They are cautious, unfriendly, suspicious people.

So Burko has just destroyed representational art.

That is a fact. Did she intend to do it?
She has said her GOD'S EYE perspective on landscape is so she can keep abstraction.

Why do just idiots review her work, ask her stupid questions?

Does Burko cry at night for these lost glaciers and icy mountains?

I do. I cry at night. Someone ask her in an interview.

Does she love them? Petit still loved the World Trade Center Towers he walked across.

Gordon Levitt as Philippe Petit

The glaciers, mountains and the World Trade Center Towers
are Strange Attractors

These buildings are seductive.  And seduction is coupled with challenge. Always. Just like mountains, like Everest. They are objects beckoning the subject. They were Strange Attractors from Baudrillardian theory. Just as particles in a particle accelerator with opposite charges seek each other, play with each other, and when they collide....pouf!

These objects, these Strange Attractors, have been luring and seducing Burko all her life. They have wanted her to know, to speak for their voicelessness.

There is no original. Both are simulacra

LINK for multi images of Burko

Reviews - I include them so you can see that they can't see.
http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c106334bd750a949d05ac8

  http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c108444bd7507e4ad05ac8

http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c0ebbd4ad7508c19c6b548

Joni MItchell A Post Modern Poet, Singer, Songwriter - Both Sides Now

Joni Mitchell - Both Sides, Now

from the LP "Clouds", 1969

Bows and flows of angel hair

and ice cream castles in the air

and feather canyons everywhere,

I've looked at clouds that way

but now they only block the sun, 

they rain and snow on everyone

so many things I would have done

but clouds got in my way

Reality and illusion: Baudrillard - The Transparency of Evil when all illusion is gone.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,

from up and down, and still somehow

it's cloud illusions I recall,

I really don't know clouds at all

Illusion again. She is so very much a philosopher. I never knew.

Moons and Junes and ferris wheels, 

the dizzy dancing way you feel

as every fairy tale comes real

I've looked at love that way

but now it's just another show,

you leave 'em laughing when you go

and if you care, don't let them know,

don't give yourself away

The "floating sign" of pretence: dissembling.

I've looked at love from both sides now,

from give and take, and still somehow

it's love's illusions I recall,

I really don't know love at all

What Zizek was saying about fucking in Reading Lacan, Eyes Wide Shut, p. 49-50

Tears and fears and feeling proud

to say "i love you" right out loud,

dreams and schemes and circus crowds,

I've looked at life that way.

But now old friends are acting strange,

they shake their heads, they say I've changed

well, somethings lost but somethings gained

in living every day

I've looked at life from both sides now,

from win and lose, and still somehow

it's life's illusions I recall,

I really don't know life at all.

The loss of illusion. Win and lose in the dialectic. 

Yes, Joni is a post modern poet who is a singer-songwriter.